Carnegie Mellon University announced on Wednesday that hedge fund chief executive Ken Griffin is donating $3 billion, with the bulk of the money for a new campus in Miami focused on societal challenges.
The Pittsburgh-based private research university said the gift is the largest ever single gift to a US university. Other donations topping the billion-dollar mark include $1.8 billion from former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins University in 2018. And Nike co-founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny, have also been prolific donors, including a $2 billion gift to Oregon Health & Science University in 2025.
Griffin’s gift includes $2 billion to build a new 35-acre campus in Miami’s Wynwood neighbourhood, just north of downtown. The campus is expected to enrol around 3,500 undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students. Construction is scheduled to begin next year.
Rather than academic majors, it will focus on what the university and Griffin described in a news release as “grand challenge areas” such as human health and biological discovery, national security and strategic capabilities, energy and climate resilience, and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.
The rest of the money will be divided evenly between the Pittsburgh campus’s computer science programme, which will be renamed after Griffin, and other unspecified projects on the main campus.
“Throughout our history, CMU has anticipated moments of profound technological change and responded with new ways of thinking and solving problems,” Carnegie Mellon’s president, Farnam Jahanian, said in a news release praising Griffin. “Artificial intelligence represents one of the defining intellectual developments of our time, and it demands that we rethink how we educate students, conduct research, and partner with others.”
Colleges are facing growing pressure to prepare students for a workforce that is rapidly being transformed by AI. Job postings including AI and machine learning in the skills requirements or job title are exploding.
At the same time, financial pressures on higher education are mounting. International enrolment is dropping just as many states are seeing their classes of high school seniors begin to shrink because of US demographic changes. Meanwhile, expenses such as fuel, healthcare, and technology are rising.
Griffin, a GOP megadonor who founded the Citadel investment firm, owns a waterfront home in Miami, which is part of a growing metropolitan area whose population tops 6.4 million.
The area already is home to the University of Miami, a private research university; Florida International University, a public research university; and Miami Dade College, which started out as a community college but also offers some four-year degrees. Combined, enrolment at the three schools totals around 135,000. Several smaller private colleges are also based in the area.
But Griffin, who has donated over the years to causes such as medical research, charter schools, and other universities, saw room for something new.
“The opportunity to bring Carnegie Mellon to Miami places our city at the heart of humanistic and scientific advancement and amplifies the university’s international reach and impact,” said Griffin, who is joining Carnegie Mellon’s board of trustees, in a news release.
Even before the announcement, Carnegie Mellon had growing ties to Florida, a state where conservatives have increased their influence on higher education.
Its computer science department runs a programme designed to teach middle school students in Florida and several other states about AI. The university also is involved in a partnership with the Gates Foundation to deploy AI-powered course materials for introductory maths classes at Miami Dade College.
AP
